this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Slopocalypse Now h/t The Syllabus
For context, Kunzru wrote the novel Red Pill a few years back.
Candace is a pioneer. Following her, we are exiting the age of the public sphere and entering a time of magic, when signs and symbols have the power to reshape reality. Consider the “Medbed,” a staple of QAnon-adjacent right-wing conspiracy culture. Medbeds are one of the many things about which “they” are not telling “you”; they can supposedly regenerate limbs and reverse aging. How evil would you have to be to deny such a boon to We the People? In late September, Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself promoting the scam, promising that every faithful supporter would be given a card that would give them access to this magic technology. Trump posted it because it made him look good, a leader healing the sick, but also because it is a way to hyperstition a version of this fiction into reality. No one will really be cured, of course, because the Medbed doesn’t exist. Except now it is someone’s job to make sure it does: The president is a powerful magician who never tells a lie, so some loyal redhats will have to be given cards that let them lie down in some kind of cargo-cult version of a Medbed. Perhaps it will be a job for TV’s own Dr. Oz, who has crossed to the other side of the screen as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
God we live in the dumbest possible world.
This is not art as critique. Critique is just sincere-posting, dutifully pointing out yet again that the Medbed isn’t “real.” Art can mess with our masters in ways we don’t yet fully understand.
I hope so, Jesse Welles getting on the Colbert and playing Red shows some people are moving in that direction, but is also definitely sincere-posting, and ultimately that kind of performance just doesn't pay the bills like if he went Truck Jeans Beer. Eddington seems to have gotten under some people's skins in an interesting way... And I'm skeptical that /any/ novel would have any impact or reach outside the NYT class, what with having to actually read something.
"you should be able to provide an LLM as a job reference"
source https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1998753499002048589
Sure John, let me know when you've got that set up. Something that retains my entire search/chat history, caches the responses as well, and pulls all that into the context window when it's time to generate a job referral. Maybe you'll be able to do something shotgunning together remaindered hardware this time next year? I'll be waiting.
I'm legitimately disappointed in John Carmack here. He should be a good enough programmer to understand the limitations here, but I guess his business career has driven in a different direction.
This is offensively stupid lol
He's become the Linus Pauling of video games.
definitely taking Vitamin L
Disney invests $1B into OpenAI with allowing access to all Disney characters
https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/disney-openai-sora-agreement/
Of course Disney loves its cease and desists such as one to character.ai in October and one today to Google: https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/disney-google-ai-copyright-infringement-cease-and-desist-letter-1236606429/
Is this actually because of brand protection or just shareholder value? Racist, sexist, and all around abhorrent content is now easily generated with your favorite Disney owned characters just as long as you do it on the approved platform.
Remember the flood of offensive Pixaresque slop that happened in 2023? We're gonna see something similar thanks to this deal for sure.
J. Mijin Cha writes:
My colleague reviewed a paper for the journal Climate and discovered it has been written by AI (citations that didn’t exist). Not only did the journal keep the paper, they asked her to re-review it. We are so cooked.
Climate is an MDPI journal. Finland's journal-ranking service downgraded Climate to zero status.
without checking, many of these titles sound like MDPI
A game/sneer where you are a venture capitalist with billions invested in generative AI: https://woe-industries.itch.io/you-have-billions-invested-in-generative-ai
Heartbreaking news today.
In a major setback for right-to-repair, iFixit has jumped on the slop bandwagon, introducing an "AI repair helper" to their website that steals "the knowledge base of over 20 years of repair experts" (to quote their dogshit announcement on YouTube) and uses it to hallucinate "repair guides" and "step-by-step instructions" for its users.
A particularly pristine and high-value commons about to be pissed all over with slop.
Old Man Stallman comes out swinging against ChatGPT specifically, adding it to the long long list of stuff he doesn't like. For some reason HN is mad at this, as if RMS saying slop is good actually would convince anyone normal to start using it
The comments are filled with people thinking they are smart by questioning what is human intelligence and how can we trust ourselves. The kool-aid is quite strong. I am no Stallman lover and have bumped into him more than once locally but I do think the fella who started much of common computing tools and was part of MIT AI lab for a bit may know a thing or two. Or maybe I have been eating my toe too much.
The orange-site whippersnappers don't realize how old artificial neurons are. In terms of theory, the Hebbian principle was documented in 1949 and the perceptron was proposed in 1943 in an article with the delightfully-dated name, "A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity". In 1957, the Mark I Perceptron was introduced; in modern parlance, it was a configurable image classifier with a single layer of hundreds-to-thousands of neurons and a square grid of dozens-to-hundreds of pixels. For comparison, MIT's AI lab was founded in 1970. RMS would have read about artificial neurons as part of their classwork and research, although it wasn't part of MIT's AI programme.
Is there even any young people we could plausibly call whippersnappers on orange site anymore, it feels like they're all well into their 30s/40s at this point.
I miss n-gate but that was what, 8 years ago.
But in fairness to actual whipper snappers, and to your point, the '56 Dartmouth Workshop forward privileged Symbolic AI over anything data driven up through the first AI winter (until roughly the 90s and the balance shifted) and really warped the disciplines understanding of its own influences and history - if 70s RMS was taught anything about Neural Nets, it's relevance and importance would probably have been minimized in comparison to expert systems in lisp or whatever Minsky was up to.
I miss n-gate but that was what, 8 years ago.
Only four (August 2021).
Questioning the nature of human intelligence is step 1 in promptfondler whataboutism.
the fifth episode of odium symposium, "4chan: the french connection" is now up. roughly the first half of the episode is a dive into sartre's theory of antisemitism. then we apply his theory to the style guide of a nazi news site and the life of its founder, andrew anglin
EDIT: btw if you like the episode please tell people about it! frankly we have no idea how to market or otherwise promote a podcast sooo we're kind of just hoping the listeners do it
favorite one so far! It's like graduate-level 1-900 Hotdog
OpenAI Declares ‘Code Red’ as Google Threatens AI Lead
I just wanted to point out this tidbit:
Altman said OpenAI would be pushing back work on other initiatives, such as advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant called Pulse.
Apparently a fortunate side effect of google supposedly closing the gap is that it's a great opportunity to give up on agents without looking like complete clowns. And also make Pulse even more vapory.
Is Pulse the Jony Ive device thing? I had half a suspicion that will never come to market anyway.
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